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| Vol. 21, No. 5 |
| March 15, 1999 |
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Research Indicates Women Survive Non-Surgical Hospital Care More Often Than Men Do women survive non-surgical hospital care more often than men do? According to research published in the March issue of the journal Medical Care, women generally have lower mortality rates than men for six common diagnoses. "The importance of gender as a prognostic factor in hospitalized patients remains poorly understood," says Dr. Howard S. Gordon, assistant professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and physician-health researcher at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "We undertook this study to more fully characterize the potentially complex relationship between gender and in-hospital death." In one of the largest studies to date, Dr. Gordon and co-author, Dr. Gary E. Rosenthal, associate professor of medicine, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, collected data on 89,793 patients discharged from 30 Northeast Ohio hospitals in 1991 and 1993, from medical records. Data included information on patients' age, gender, medical history, and laboratory test results for six common non-surgical diagnoses. Among the six diagnoses, the adjusted odds of death were higher in men, compared to women, for four of six diagnoses including stroke, obstructive airway disease, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, and pneumonia. The results were similar for congestive heart failure and acute myocardial infarction for both genders. "We really expected the death rates to be the same, since we were looking at hospitalization for acute illness," says Dr. Gordon. Drs. Gordon and Rosenthal's study raises questions about the specific gender-related differences that may influence non-surgical health care. "There are several gender-related differences that may influence non-surgical treatment outcomes such as higher prevalence of unmeasured risk factors in men, better characterization of risk factors in men, geographic variation in treatment, gender variations in the utilization of inpatient, outpatient hospital or nursing home care, and biological differences," says Dr. Rosenthal. - FRANK MARTIN
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